quack, thanks for your reply and the suggestion about my website. I changed the colors.

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Put simply, the premise that Life is an evolving molecular machine is wrong. Whenever I have been studying a machine, I have studied how it works. I never have bothered with thoughts about its design. I have assumed that it was designed and built for a specific purpose and left it at that.

This comments amazes me. What else could it be than a molecular machine in a mechanistic world view. My problem with mainstream evolutionary science is that they a) seems to agree that life is just mechanistics, i.e. an evolving, molecular machine, but b) do not seem willing to think in mechanistic terms, i.e. design terms.

Of course you are bothered by the design when you analyze a function. Take for instance a car, you won't understand it unless you know what it is for (purpose) and how it works (design). The difference between aq diesel engine and a gasolne engine is in its design.

If I analyze windows XP, I study its modular design. If one does not understand object-orientation, it is impossible to understand it.

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What does it mean – is 3+ billion years insufficient to account for evolution? In my opinion, the geological and fossil record, in addition to other evidence shows it absolutely sufficient.

I agree with you that evolution happened in about 3 billion years. I just do not believe that the current evolutionary scenarios are possible in that time-span, and advocate other scenarios. I think it would take 100s of billions of years to get a eukaryote out of a prokaryote, or to develop insect larval stages de novo, or to change a bacterium into a mitochondrion.

Instead, a careful analysis of the workings of the molecular machine (and take engineering aspects into consideration) point in my opinion to a complete different scenario, all within a mechanistic view on evolution.

What I am trying to convey, is that design aspects are relevant for every complex system. We can easily incorporate feedback mechanisms (=a design pattern) into development, but we have problems by introducing similar deisgn patterns for evolution.

Another way to loom at it, is trying to do some reverse engineering: what would be the requirements for an evolving machine, and how could this have been implemented (using RM+NS as driving forces) in evolution. Design does not equal Designer.